Essentials of Early English

Old, Middle and Early Modern English

Jeremy J. Smith, Jeremy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134292424
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a completely revised and updated edition of a highly successful textbook.

It provides a practical and highly accessible introduction to the early stages of the English language: Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English. Designed specifically as a handbook for students beginning the study of early English language, whether for linguistic or literary purposes, it presumes little or no prior knowledge of the history of English.

Features of thissecond editioninclude:

• newly added Middle English and Early Modern English sample texts and accompanying notes
• a new section on historical methods
• web links and an updated annotated bibliography.

Part I

Description

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 About this book

This book has been planned as a practical, straightforward introduction for those beginning to study the early states of the English language, whether for linguistic or for literary purposes. It is divided into three Parts: Part I, consisting of descriptive material; Part II, consisting of illustrative texts with brief accompanying notes; and Part III, consisting of an Annotated Bibliography, an Old English Glossary and a Thematic Index. Although it is designed to be self-standing, it is best used as an accompaniment to standard introductory histories of the language, and as a prequel to the more advanced books which currently serve as standard introductory surveys. All these works are described below in the Annotated Bibliography.

This book assumes little or no knowledge of the history of the language or even of the descriptive terminology needed to talk meaningfully about it. This contextualising Introduction, which includes a skeleton outline of the history of English in relation to its origins, is therefore followed in Chapter 2 by a short description of the linguistic terminology used elsewhere in the book. If readers are confident of their knowledge of phonetics, grammar, etc., they may, if they wish, skip that chapter.

This general sketch of linguistic terminology is followed by three descriptive chapters (3, 4 and 5) concerned with three stages in the history of English: Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English. The descriptions of these language-states provided here are focused on, although not restricted to, three usages which may be regarded as in some senses prototypical: the languages of King Alfred, of Chaucer and of Shakespeare respectively. Of these, Chapter 3 is the longest, since, although Old English is the most distant from present-day usage, the essential linguistic configuration of subsequent states of the language was established in Old English times. (It is for that reason that any student of the history of English needs at least a basic understanding of the structure of Old English – indeed, it may be argued that to study the history of English without a knowledge of Old English is to build on sand.) These descriptions make up the core of Part I of the book.

In Part II a set of illustrative and annotated texts is provided. These are designed simply as illustrations of the points made in Chapters 3, 4 and 5; it is expected that readers and teachers will want to supplement them with other material from other textbooks.

These descriptions are followed in Part III by suggestions for further reading and study. Although for simplicity’s sake references in the body of the book have been avoided, this Annotated Bibliography has been provided so that students can pursue particular issues in greater depth than is possible here. Also included in Part III is a Glossary to the OE texts in Part II.

It is hoped that students who have worked their way through the book will have acquired a clear understanding of the structure of the various stages of early English. They should then be able to proceed to further study with a secure foundation of basic linguistic knowledge – essential whether the focus of their future work is to be philological/linguistic or more literary. It is held here that any philological work without such a foundation of coreknowledge is largely a waste of time. Moreover, any literary appreciation of stylistic choices made in earlier states of the language must surely be based on a secure grasp of what choices were available at the time.

1.2 English and its origins

English is now used as a first language by about 700 million speakers, and is a second language for many millions more. It appears in many guises, ranging from the ‘new’ Englishes of Africa and Asia, e.g. Indian English, through the usages of North America to the oldest established varieties (the English of England, Hiberno-English and Scots in Lowland Scotland). English is now the most widespread language in linguistic function and geographical extent that the world has ever seen. The modern varieties of English have emerged over the last five or six centuries through contact with other languages and through dynamic interaction with each other. All, however, derive from one ultimate source: the Germanic language-variety which was brought to southern and eastern Britain from northern Germany by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century AD. The people who spoke this variety supplanted the Romano-British inhabitants, who gradually retreated to the northern and western parts of the island where, in North Wales and the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, they remain. The invaders’ usage subsequently became a distinct language, English, which developed and spread within the British Isles up to the sixteenth century. English was taken beyond these islands with the imperial expansions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

During these centuries the structure of the English language changed radically. Our evidence for these changes comes, of course, not from the direct analysis of speech – for sound-recordings of English only began to be made at the end of the nineteenth century – but from comparative study of other languages, and through the painstaking analysis by scholars of the written records which have come down to us continuously from the seventh century onwards.

All Germanic languages derive from a common ancestor known as Proto-Germanic, which seems to have emerged during the first millennium BC as the language of a group of people living in what is now Denmark and southern Sweden. English is a member of the western branch of the Germanic languages, so-called West Germanic, which also includes German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and (its closest Germanic relative) Frisian, this last being a language-variety spoken in what is now part of the Netherlands. Other branches of Germanic which are traditionally identified include North Germanic (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic) and East Germanic (now extinct, and recorded for the most part in the fourthcentury Gothic Bible translation of Bishop Ulfilas).

The Germanic languages are themselves part of a much larger languagefamily: the Indo-European group, which includes such diverse languages as Bengali and Brythonic, Russian and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I Description
• Part II Illustrative Texts
• Part III Bibliography, Glossary and Thematic Index